Olive and the Dragon, page 16
OTHER BOOKS IN THE SERIES
Greenwing & Dart
1. Stargazy Pie
2. Bee Sting Cake
3. Whiskeyjack
4. Blackcurrant Fool
5. Love-in-a-Mist
6. Plum Duff
7. Bubble & Squeak (forthcoming)
And the companion shorter works:
Stone Speaks to Stone
Clary Sage
Traveller’s Joy
Balancing Stone
The Saint of the Bookstore
OLIVE AND THE DRAGON
VICTORIA GODDARD
Copyright © 2025 by Victoria Goddard
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
With many thanks to Ehsan, Jenny, Julia, Lee, Lin, and Rachel for their cheerleading, encouragement, and extremely useful nitpicking. And especially to Lee for the company sprinting. Thank you!
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Author’s Note
1
Late summer that year had one of those spells of hot, heavy weather, where everything felt drenched in honey in the day-time and bubbling over with effervescent mead in the night.
Olive woke early, Lammas Eve, to the first call-and-response cock-crows. First the black gamecock at the big house, strident in the dark; then the young white cockerel at the tenant cottage across the river, crow still garbled and uncertain; and finally her own fine green-tailed red chanticleer with his resonant cri-curi-cri from his perch above the hen-house.
Olive had left her linen dressing-gown on the back of the chair the night before, and she slipped into it, patting smooth the still slightly stiff fabric. It was new this summer, a gift from Jack, dyed the deep turquoise that only magic could make fast. It was plain otherwise; Olive had already decided she would spend some time over the winter embroidering its hems with silken thread.
She turned back to look at her husband, who had woken when she rose and now blinked sleepily, smiling, at her. Jack did not usually remain so still for her, and Olive was glad to have the time to trace the lines of his face, rendered once more familiar with a summer home, after the year away.
She was proud of her husband, a soldier, an officer, commended for his courage and his cunning—but oh! It was hard sometimes, when he was gone; and hard, sometimes, when he was home.
But her mostly-happy marriage was not what had woken her so early, nor even the crowing roosters. The sky was a deep ultramarine blue, luminous as a rung bell: her window faced south, towards her distant Woods, though the more open view was towards the east. The Morning Star hung over the green horizon where the sun had yet to show, companion Dwile unusually visible a little above it.
The dream still lingered, silvering the edge of every shadow in the room, showing her husband both as he was now and also the faces he had borne as a child, a youth, the young man she had married, the retired soldier she had yet to see. A strange destiny hovered around him, bitter folded into sweet, pain into resilience, love into time. Hope, she dared think, into endurance.
“My love?” Jack said softly, meeting her eyes unflinchingly with his own. He had seen her wake from enough dreams to know to be gentle with her as she found her way back to the world of the here-and-now.
“The Woods are calling me,” she said, unable to translate any of her visions into words he might understand.
“Tell me,” he said regardless, as he always did, for all that he never quite understood.
She fumbled with her hands on the tie on the belt, with her mind in the tangle of her thoughts, drawing near to the dream, as if she moved toward a keyhole and sought to describe another country to her husband. Perhaps that was what it was. Jack was well-travelled, far more well-travelled than she. He had often crossed the borders of the Empire and looked upon the stars of strange worlds. And yet this was a country around every corner, in the corner of every eye, that he had never seen.
“The roots of the trees are reaching deep,” she said, watching his eyes glint softly in the darkness, catching the light of the Morning Star. “The leaves are speaking in tongues. The birds are silent, hiding, waiting, listening. The river … oh the river is honey, honey.”
There was always honey, in her dreams of the Woods. Root and branch, leaf and bloom, the river winding through it all: and over all, in all, the sap rising, the dew falling, the nectar made thick and sweet and sure.
He nodded seriously. Time layered infinitely thin wafers of identity on his face. Men he had been, was, would be, might be, might have been. The shadows curled towards the light of the Morning Star, each overlapping shadow silver-edged, distinct from its neighbours.
“What do you need me to do?” Jack asked, and if his face was all the thousand faces he might ever wear, his voice was her husband’s, and this, this, this was why she welcomed him each time he came home.
The roosters called again, the gamecock and the young cockerel and their proud chanticleer each in their turns, as orange light flushed through the green, the blue, veiling all the stars but for the Morning Star and her companion.
Olive had dreamed of the next days a hundred times, for all it was no necessary tragedy for any of them, seeing fragments play out of a hundred different choices.
No necessary tragedy, if she chose aright.
She could only root herself in the knowledge she had, so abundant that she was as lost in the kaleidoscope of possibilities as anyone walking forward blindly into the unknown might be.
Olive was used to unusual certainties and incomprehensible uncertainties and seemingly ordinary choices that fractured the future into a thousand possible roads. Why this Lammastide was such a day she did not know; but it was.
“Take Jemis away with you for a few days,” Olive said, watching as the futures collapsed with each word, each step forward on a chosen path. “I must go to the Woods, and he is too young for this. His time will come soon enough.”
For the last words, her voice was limned with unexpected prophecy. Jack looked at her, her dear practical soldier, enough poetry in him to meet her on common ground. Olive looked back gravely, knowing nothing more than the words that had emerged from her mouth. After a long moment, he huffed a goodly attempt at a laugh and said, “Our son is rather precocious, isn’t he? Probably we should be careful about over-encouraging him.”
She smiled genuinely at that, and picked up her hairbrush. Jack’s face lightened, sharpened, the layers melding into his present self; the shadows stirred and then settled into indistinguishable intensities. Outside, their chanticleer crowed a third time. From down the hall came a thump and an audible cry of “And a very good morning to you, Mr. Chanticleer!” from their precious, precocious nine-year-old son.
Jack chuckled and slid out from under the blankets. “I take it that we are rising at dawn, again,” he grumbled good-naturedly, and came round to the window where Olive still stood. He kissed the back of her neck and gently took the brush from her hand, for he knew she loved to have him brush her hair when he was home.
Olive watched the point on the horizon where the sun was about to crest, a third point of light below the two planets of the morning, and wondered at the sense of coiling, sliding, serpentine scales twisting through the softening edges of her dream.
It was not that she had not expected the dragon might one day come for her. But she was surprised that it should be now.
Olive was a daughter of the Woods, a Woodlander as they called themselves; the daughter of the Woods, by the old laws of the land. For generations that went well back before the coming of the Empire the Woods had chosen her family as its guardians. The imperial title was old enough to be well-respected at court, but it was parvenu, inconsequential, in the Woods.
The imperial title was one she might have claimed, had she not been warned in dream after dream of the perils of doing so: that in doing so neither she nor her son would survive long; and with no one of her lineage to hold the Woods, the ancient agreements that were held in her bloodline would fail, and so too then would the Woods, sooner or later destroyed from within or without.
That Olive had not claimed her due title had been an insuperable offense to her mother, who was a wizard in the Astandalan manner and did not offer much shrift to the ways of the Woods. Olive’s Sight was not magic, as her mother understood it. It worked in other modes, which her mother could not perceive and so (since hers was a wizardry particularly of perception) did not accept existed. To her, Olive’s dreams were vain fancies and figments, nothing to be encouraged.
Even so, this might not have been so great a problem had Olive not already made the egregious error of marrying the impecunious younger son of minor country gentry and then compounded it with living in the Dower Cottage of his family estate—a building commodious and pleasing but not, it must be said, unworthy of the name cottage—instead of in the Castle Noirell. But Olive had not needed her dreams to worry about what might come of raising her son under her mother’s too-watchful eye.
Jemis, that morning at breakfast, was bright-eyed and cheerful, laughing at every other sentence any of them said, words tumbling over themselves as he tried to keep up with Jack’s run of ever-more-ridiculous suggestions for what they m
He had always been a slim child, very active and with a propensity to get distracted partway through a meal by a story or a flight of fancy. Very often he reminded her of her father, dead now and dearly missed, with the same pointed chin she had also inherited and his grandfather’s deep-running sensitivity instead of her incorrigible dreams.
But then Olive had chosen differently than her father when it came to her heir’s naming-day.
Jemis had a spark of wizardly magic, though in very few of Olive’s dreams did he ever cultivate that art. Her mother would have squeezed every drop of it out of him, if Olive had given her the chance.
(In the futures they lived in the Castle Noirell—at home—Jemis was brilliant and accomplished, but never happy. And too often lost, one way or another, to the dark.)
He was nine. It was the age a child of the aristocracy was acknowledged publicly. Olive would have to present him to her mother at some point soon.
(Perhaps it was not so strange that the Woods were calling her this summer. It was half a year since Jemis’s birthday. The ways of the Woods were older than Astandalas, but Olive’s family had become as intertwined with imperial culture as the Woods were with the magic of the Border. Very likely the Woods knew it was time.)
“But what about Mama? Shan’t she come with us?” Jemis asked abruptly, turning his face up towards hers.
Olive had not been paying attention to their eager, flitting conversation. She smiled down at her son, holding her delicate tea-cup with steady hands at her lip. Took a sip of the fragrant lemony tea, sweetened with a drop of the honey from her Woods. Jemis’s face blurred in the steam, characteristics that were in the child barest buds unfurling into branches heavy with blossom or green leaves.
So few of his futures ever brought forth those brave blossoms into fruit. Olive had spent many long and lonely hours alone in her marriage bed with only her dreams for company, seeking what path might open on a life that was not only long, but happy.
It was not Jemis alone whose future was so uncertain. Some days Olive could hardly bear to walk abroad, for death hovered around every soul she saw. Something dreadful was coming, and soon. Each year it grew clearer, no longer to be evaded, though she did not know what it was or how to prepare for it, this plague or pestilence that would truncate the lives of half or more the living around her.
She drank her tea, and set down the tea-cup, and her son’s face softened from the sharp-eyed adult he might yet become to the bright-eyed boy he was in the here-and-now. “I have an errand in the Woods this week,” she said. “You spend the time with your father, darling. We’ll do something together, next week.”
“Are you certain, Mama?”
“Yes, love,” she said absently, reaching out to brush the soft brown hair back from his face.
He was such a kind boy, to be torn between worry she would be left out and excitement to spend the time with his so-often-absent father. She hoped he would not lose that kindness, that eager openness, that love; that she was picking paths now that did not close those off for him even before he was able to choose them for himself.
“Then we’ll bring you back a present! Won’t we, Papa? Then it will be like you were with us the whole time!” Jemis declared, solving the puzzle with simple delight. Thus decided, he pounced on the half-scone he’d previously abandoned and proceeded to glop strawberry jam upon it. Olive and Jack smiled at each other, in perfect accord and shared joy.
She left her menfolk discussing their proposed adventure and put a light shawl over her head and shoulders before crossing the threshold. It was Lammas Eve, which was not one of the greater crossing-points of the year—but still, it was a quarter-day. It was prudent to take precautions.
The lacework shawl was of cobweb-fine thread that glinted silver and green in the shade and snow-white in the sun. It had been knit long ago by a distant foremother, so the tales went, after she had gone where Olive was going and not returned for seven years and seven days.
But she had learned enough that her descendants had not fallen for that trap again.
So it was that generation by generation, step by step, the guardians of the Woods learned their way to its heart.
It was hot, even an hour after dawn. The air was thick, dusty in the back of her throat, silent with the vast silence of the crickets. Olive walked through the big house’s grounds to the path that wound along this side of the river. She met no one. But then this was not a path many took.
There was movement on the other side of the river, where the tenants were harvesting the first wheat. Tomorrow they would bake loaves to offer to the Green Lady for Lammastide, the beginning of the harvest season.
Olive admired their steady industry, though she guessed they must be very hot in their light smocks, faded orange or blue or green scarves tied around their heads to hold back the sweat and the sun. Jack’s brother Rinald was a good landlord, who had spent years rebuilding the family fortune by hard work and thrift. He would not spend money on enchanted cloth for his workers, not when there was cool water in the river to soak their scarves instead.
She put them out of her mind—she did not have that magic either, and her mother who might have condescended to do the enchanting, had Olive asked, would not do it on her own cognizance, and moreover was most likely at Court for the summer season and therefore could not be asked at all.
The footpath kept pace with the bends and bights of the river, first through a series of pastures. Arguty had once been known for its fine racehorses, but the breeding stock had been sold to pay for debts, and now these lush meadows fed dairy cattle and heavy draught horses instead. They ignored Olive as she ghosted past them, barefoot on the beaten-earth path, cobweb shawl tickling her bare ankles below the calf-length green dress she had donned.
Green for the Lady of Summer, who had always been a patron of the Woodlanders.
She held her shoes in one hand, for this, too, was knowledge hard-earned by an ancestor. Come to the Woods and the Woods would provide according to one’s humility and kindness and cleverness. To come barefoot, empty-handed, wide-hearted: that was the way Olive had been taught by her father and her father’s mother and the dreams that had guided and warned her her whole life long.
It was some ten or a dozen miles from Arguty to the Woods even as the crow flew home, but the river-path followed some chink or soft place in the world, and so long as Olive did not step off the narrow river of beaten earth it would take her no more than an hour to traverse the winding distance. She suspected there were more such paths through the valley of southernmost Fiellan, though this was the only one that had opened to her. But then again, it was the only one she needed.
She watched the river as she walked, the smooth constant rush of the water, the ripples and eddies here and there, the rushes and reeds at its margins. Most of the birds were long since finished nesting, but she saw what must have been a second clutch of geese, two white adults and six grey half-grown goslings gangly even in the water behind them.
The sky was cloudless behind her, but there was a kind of wavering quality to the light above the distant mountains that suggested there might be thunderstorms later in the day. Olive knew the mountains were not nearly so far-off as they looked, but those ahead of her—the three peaks that rose up behind the farther reaches of the Woods—might easily have been in another world as fifteen miles away. Indeed, it would be much easier to cross to another world than to climb those peaks, for the Border between Alinor and Ysthar lay between here and there.
And, even more unusually, here the Border between worlds marked also the Border between what was the Empire of Astandalas and those parts of Alinor which remained unconquered. The March of the Woods was an imperial title for just that reason, to guard the crossing.
It was customary for all those who lived there to ignore those mountains, even more so their fellows marching off to the south and west. On maps of the Empire they were not even marked as anything but the Crosslains, the Border mountains. On maps of Northwest Oriole, the continent, the fringe of familiar peaks gave way soon to the blankness of the terra incognita.
